Book 18: As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

That’s not exactly true, it just took me a LONG-ASS time to get through one of the four I’ve been trying to read. Shockingly, this was the easiest to read of all of them… how is that even possible? Well, put this up against Siebald’s Vertigo, and there you have it.

So, a wise person once said ‘Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people’… and while I tend to agree with that statement to a point, I think I feel pretty confident in saying that this story, although somewhat comical at times, was a damn tragedy.

I wouldn’t put this on the same level as East of Eden or the Grapes of Wrath, but it’s still a tragedy through and through, as far as I’m concerned. There were a few parts where I found myself thinking that if we could remove the fact that a family member had died, this would be rather comical. And there are some amusing things that happen in the book that fall into the category of ‘this is so ridiculous, all I can do is laugh’.

In the end, the entire family has fallen into differing degrees of ruin, with only the most minimal bits of light shining through. It was a really great read, although there were parts that I felt I had to go back and read again, because it almost took me too long to figure out what had just happened. But that’s par for the course when you’re reading dialect, I guess.